The fresh-faced teenager in the McDonald's commercial might
be smiling and seem friendly, but fast-food legend Ray Kroc once
said, "If I ever saw a competitor drowning, I'd put a live
fire hose in his mouth."

Don't judge the late Ray Kroc too harshly. He was speaking
of an age-old tradition. Entrepreneurs have always trounced the
competition, and it hasn't always been pretty. in the 1800s,
John D. Rockefeller made Standard Oil company into a monopoly,
controlling 90 percent of the oil market, by negotiating secret
rebates with railroads, bribing Congressmen and committing
industrial espionage. About the same time, in England, the United
Kingdom Telegraph Company hired men to cut down the poles of its
rival, Electric Telegraph Company. As that century closed,
newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst helped start the
Spanish-American War to sell newspapers and crush his competition.
More recently, Microsoft has been in the news facing accusations of
using unfair business practices in an attempt to build its own
monopoly.

But while entrepreneurs have always been against the opposing
team, the way we're competing is changing. "Competition
isn't as cutthroat as it used to be," observes Roger
Nagel, a professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
and co-author of Cooperate to Compete: Building Agile Business
Relationships (John Wiley & Sons) and Agile Competitors and
Virtual Organizations: Strategies for Enriching the Customer (John
Wiley & Sons). "When you're finished with your
competitors, you no longer have to see them lying on the
ground."

And as competition evolves, entrepreneurs like Leon Richter are
actually finding they enjoy it. Call it the thrill of
competition-it's a rush; it's a natural high; it's the
kick you get making a deal before your nemesis does.

Richter, 29, is the CEO of Justice Telecom, a $100 million
telecommunications solution provider based in Los Angeles that
competes for shares of the overseas phone market in places like
Scandinavia, South America, and the United Arab Emirates. To hear
Richter tell it, his company is a dinghy competing against the
ocean tide, but he nevertheless wakes up in a good mood every day.
"It's absolutely a thrill," says Richter of
competition. "It's a huge motivation for us."

In the competitive world of journalism, Geoff Williams is a
frequent contributor to Entrepreneur and a features writer
for The Cincinnati Post. He recently saw his first feature
in Ladies' Home Journal.

The Thrill?

When Jim Geary is interviewed by a reporter, the question always
comes: "Who's your competition?"

Geary looks at the reporter . . . mulls over
the question for a moment . . .
wonders why he should give his competition free publicity-then he
lies. He names his fourth and fifth competitors as
the guys he really needs to beat. Then if the reporter asks about
his actual top competition by name, Geary waves them off with
"Oh, we don't really compete with them."

Geary, 43, is the CEO of 2-year-old SHYM Technologies, a
Needham, Massachusetts, company that provides security software for
companies that handle financial transactions through their Web
sites. "I think people thrive on it," he says of
competition. "People enjoy it because it validates their
strategies. It helps validate the thinking or the insight that they
had, and with that comes a heck of a lot of satisfaction-and, of
course, market success."

But Geary draws the line at calling competition "a
kick." And that's understandable, according to Gary
Cadenhead, a senior lecturer on entrepreneurship at the University
of Texas, Austin. "I've never heard an entrepreneur jump
up and down and say, 'Hey! We've got
competitors,' " Cadenhead says. "It's not
something anybody's going to think is great. That said,
it's a reality, and, once the reality is there, it's like
any kind of athletic event where there's a thrill. There's
an excitement in giving your best and seeing how that compares with
somebody else's best."

But Michael Morris, director of the entrepreneurial center at
Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, doesn't see competition as
ever creating much of a rush for entrepreneurs. "Like most
people," muses Morris, "entrepreneurs are strong
believers in competition and see the value in it-as long as it
isn't for their business." Still, he concedes that many
entrepreneurs recognize that competition has benefited both their
businesses and their customers: "In terms of pricing, it keeps
them honest."

Party In Private

We'll never know whether Geary dances in his underwear
through his house-Ã¡ la Risky Business-or Richter screams
"I'm da man" after scoring a big deal. That's for
them to know and you not to find out. As Richter says, "If my
company were an athletic team, when we score, we would try to make
it look like we've done it before. We're not the
kind of people who do an end-zone dance."

If anybody had an end-zone dance coming to him, it was Jim
Heckman when he inked an exclusive deal with Fox Sports to
broadcast their events on the Internet. Heckman's Seattle-based
company, which, as things would have it, is called Rivals.Com,
trumped numerous competitors, including ESPN.com (which is owned by
The Walt Disney Company, probably the biggest competitor of all).
Nevertheless, Heckman, 34, who once sold his car to start a
football magazine, says he had no time to celebrate. "We
raised a glass of champagne," Heckman says. "Then I
jumped on a plane. That was the celebration."

But when pressed to admit whether he allowed himself to shout
"Yee-haw!" in the privacy of his own home, Heckman dodges
the question with an explanation of how he felt raising that glass
of champagne: "What you really feel is relief, and all of the
concern you had felt leaves."

"Your excitement is short-lived," adds Geary,
"because as soon as you sit back and bask in the glory, your
competitors are making their next move."

Competition Grows Up

Nagel, who travels the globe speaking and consulting on the
topic of competition in the 21st century, imagines a Competition
Utopia, a land with "no winners and losers," a world in
which competition and cooperation go hand in hand and you send care
baskets and thank-you notes to your competitors rather than dream
about seeing them wearing rags standing in the soup line.

And that vision isn't a view through rose-colored glasses.
According to Nagel, it's already happening. Flip through a
magazine, he says, and you can see Motorola promoting a Palm Pilot.
One World and Star Alliance, Nagel points out, are agreements among
individual airlines to cooperate with each other, to help foster
smoother flights for their customers.

Somebody, of course, has to make money, and somebody else is
going to lose it. But Nagel says the future mind-set will be:
"I'm not really willing to backstab you; I'm
willing to beat you. But I don't want to do anything
that will make me morally unacceptable to be a partner, because I
may want to partner with you tomorrow."

Richter echoes that sentiment. "We're on very good
terms with competitors who are like us, upstart companies. It's
really the entrenched incumbents that tend to resort to either
unfair practices or who are dismissive with us. People are in your
corner, and they help you out. It's not a zero-sum
game."

Watch Your Back

But even if competition someday becomes fun for everybody, it
isn't going to go away. Ask Richter, who's constantly
reminded that if he wants a market share, he going to have to fight
for it. Richter recalls that in his company's early days, while
attending a conference in a posh hotel in Santiago, Chili, he
happened to spot an executive from one of his chief rivals,
Telefonica, which provides telephone service to one-third of South
American homes. Richter walked up and introduced himself as the CEO
of Justice Telecom.

"The dismissive [competitors] are the ones we go after
first," says Richter. "It helps fuel the fire."

And if you can't hack the competition? Here's
Geary's advice: "Get out of the business and move
on."

If that seems harsh, Geary explains his thoughts this way:
"There are a lot of guys out there who really get depressed,
and have their businesses suppressed, because their competitors
have put them in a box. If you can't enjoy the work, and it
starts to take a toll on you mentally or physically, maybe it's
time to do something different. That's what's great about
living in this country. We have lots of opportunities, and people
don't choose that opportunity enough. Not that you have
to succumb, but maybe you aren't the best person to fight the
battle."

Tough love from Jim Geary, someone who sincerely cares about
your well-being. Or maybe not. Maybe Geary is only offering the
advice because he wants you out of the game. After all, who
needs the extra competition?